Your morning Phil: Soriano, Pujols, Buehrle

July 20, 2011|By Phil Rogers, Tribune reporter

Talking baseball while wondering if the NFL will try speed dating with its free agents: 1. This is so Cub. They have a player who is in demand and unwilling to waive his no-trade rights, and they have a player who is not in demand who says he wants to play for a contender.

If only Aramis Ramirez had Alfonso Soriano’s attitude … or Soriano had Ramirez’s production over the last couple of months.

Soriano, signed through 2014, possibly could be offloaded if he was hitting, and the Cubs were willing to pay a lot (at least half, I’d guess) of his salary for the next three seasons. But we’ll probably never know about the second part of that equation because Soriano isn’t taking care of the first part.

The Yankees were kicking around the idea of acquiring Soriano as a left fielder/DH a month ago, and then Soriano stopped hitting. He had 12 home runs the first two months of the season (10 of them in April) but since June 1 is hitting .227 with two home runs and 12 RBIs. His OPS has dropped to a very ordinary, and essentially non-tradable, .744.

While there is little relevance with him not hitting, he did tell the Sun-Times that he would welcome the chance to play for a contender, if Jim Hendry could make a trade happen. He said he didn’t even know he had a no-trade clause in the eight-year contract he signed before the 2007 season.

Ramirez, on the other hand, continues to insist that it would be unfair to his family for him to accept a trade. It’s the same stance Derrek Lee took a year ago (before ultimately accept a deal after a waiver-claim was made on him by the Braves in August), but this time it could really hurt the Cubs. There was little market for Lee a year ago; there is a huge market building for Ramirez.

The Angels, Yankees, Tigers, Pirates and even the Giants (who would move Pablo Sandoval to first base) are among the teams who would pay heavily to get Ramirez, but he’s unwilling to accept a trade. So he’ll go on killing the ball for the Cubs, and in the process could actually hurt the team by winning games that will cost them positioning in the 2012 draft.

The Cubs aren’t going to get the No. 1 draft pick; the Astros have that baby locked up. But they could pick second, and that’s more likely to happen if they trade Ramirez for prospects. So it’s a win-win, and it’s not likely to happen. That’s why they’re the Cubs.

2. Albert Pujols is hitting but his return has hardly sparked the Cardinals. They were 7-7 when he was out with a broken bone in his left wrist, and have gone 3-6 since he returned, dropping from first place in the Central, with a lead of 1 1-2 games, to third place, 1 1-2 back of the Pirates. Pujols has hit .273 with three homers and 10 RBIs in those games, but the Cardinals have averaged only 4.2 runs. A lineup with him, Lance Berkman and Matt Holliday in the middle should be doing better than it is.

There’s probably no way this would happen, but imagine the feeding frenzy if they went into freefall over the next 10 days and then decided to put Albert on the market. The reality is that Pujols’ down year makes it more likely that he will return to St. Louis than it would have been had he put up vintage numbers.

3. MLB’s ongoing labor negotiations must produce a better system for compensating teams that lose free-agent players. The current system is broken in several ways, one of them being the way Elias ranks players over a two-year period. Too often these rankings don’t reflect the true value of players, overrating some and underrating others.

The go-to website mlbtraderumors.com recently ran a look at reverse-engineered Elias rankings, projecting how players currently rank. One of the surprises is that the White Sox’s Mark Buehrle would be a Type B free agent, just the same as teammate Edwin Jackson. The rankings clearly don’t value durability and consistency like teams do, because there’s no way Buehrle should rank behind the likes of Max Scherzer and Ricky Romero, who are Type A free agents.

Assuming that they want to re-sign Buehrle, the Sox would be better off for him to rank as a Type A free agent, because that would mean he’d cost a team signing him (the Cardinals, for instance) a first- or second-round pick. There’s no potential loss of a pick to sign a Type B. Here’s hoping this doesn’t matter, and the White Sox will sign Buehrle to another two- or three-year deal, but Ozzie Guillen recently said that there’s no way to know if Buehrle will be back. That’s crazy. Ken Williams should lock him up before he gets onto the market.